Bad bivalve blues

From a distance, I could feel the tension in the air. It radiated from my suki’s face. The man talking to her had his back to me, but his hand motions — outward, heavy, abrupt — said it all. Like any good usisero, I elbowed my way through the growing crowd for a ringside view.

“…you knew that, so you should have thrown them away!” he was saying.

“Believe me,” the woman pleaded, “I didn’t–”

“You’re saying you didn’t smell them? Well, I did!” Now I had a better view, I realized I knew him: a classmate’s cousin, also a friend’s ex. Apparently, his daughter had eaten a bad clam and fallen sick.

“Oi,” I said. “Which ones?”

Manang pointed to the libo-o — a little too feebly, if you ask me. Did she knowingly sell bad clams?

Now, before you jump to conclusions, let me fill you in on one other detail. Yes, the clams opened once cooked, as per the aggrieved party. And yet his child was in the hospital. How come?

My two cents’ worth: the child did eat a bad/dead clam. There’s bound to be some in a batch; how often have I had to warn people against opening and eating one? And these were adults, mind. Hadn’t their parents taught them?

In this day and age, you can always find contradictory advice on any given topic. Some people insist it is safe to eat an unopened clam (as opposed to dead, some being slower to open than others). I say let them. According to this article, the admonition to avoid clams that refuse to open was unheard of until 1973, when it first appeared in Jane Grigson’s Fish Book (Penguin). True or not, I see no harm in discarding them. Since when was getting sick a choice?

I recounted the morning’s incident to Jenny. “Did I tell you about the time I ate a bad oyster in Dumaguete?” she said, shivering at the thought. “It was the worst night of my life.”

“Really? I thought the worst was that time you drank Red Horse on top of Fundador.”

“Shut up.”

Oh, I can’t imagine how it could have been that bad when she and Ghia are already planning for us to visit the oyster farms at Consolacion in Cebu. In any case, had I not sworn to never again eat monggos and mangkô after my first experience with gouty arthritis? So there. What does not kill us makes us stronger — I think it was my father who taught me that.